Hunted(64)

She gasped wordlessly, and Lena, seeing Yeva’s eyes go to her belly, grinned. “I did always like things to be prompt,” Lena said, making Radak laugh softly in her ear. “The baby’s no exception. He should be along in another four months.”

Yeva gaped. She was still getting used to being a sister again, and now she would have to learn to be an aunt. “I’ve missed so much,” she said, passing a hand over her eyes.

“Where were you?” Solmir burst out. He’d been quiet through most of the story, contributing only to dismiss the sisters’ descriptions of his devotion to them during Yeva’s absence with shakes of his head and flicks of his hand. He wouldn’t look at Yeva directly, not if she was looking at him—he’d drop his eyes like a guilty man, as though his care and protection of her sisters was an act he ought to be ashamed of.

Yeva was slow to answer, at first because she was distracted by Solmir, and then because she could not think how to start. Each minute that she spent in her house, with her sisters, surrounded by the trappings of home, of wealth and security and all that had been stripped from her over the last year, made her life in the Beast’s valley seem more and more distant.

Like it was no more than a fairy story, to be read in an old leather-bound book, from the safety and comfort of a warm bed.

Yeva accepted a cup of tea from the cook and blew on its steaming surface to buy herself time to order her thoughts. She took a sip to wet her throat, and began. “Do you remember the Beast Father spoke of, before he vanished?”

As the afternoon passed into evening and evening into night, Solmir left to return to the baron’s household, where he was staying. As an eligible bachelor, it was hardly proper for him to stay too late in a household with two unmarried girls. The baron had been ailing from a chill caught over the last winter, and as his heir apparent, Solmir was a great comfort to him.

The servants brought dinner, and then tea, and then sweetmeats, and then cordial and brandy, all the while lingering a little too long in the sitting room as Yeva told her story. She imagined them gathering in the kitchen, each contributing what they’d overheard as they tried to patch together, thread by thread, the tapestry of Yeva’s time with the Beast.

“I heard he was no Beast at all, but a man under a curse . . . ,” one would say, while another would interrupt, “But I heard her say he had fangs and claws, and a roar so loud it shook the very earth beneath her feet.”

At first her sisters, and Radak and Solmir as well, interrupted her with questions. But after Solmir was forced to depart, the questions grew fewer and fewer, and her sisters and her brother-in-law fell quiet, listening to the story. After its end they sat together there in front of the fire, digesting what Yeva had told them, and watching her with an even deeper, more profound disbelief and awe than when they’d first seen her, risen from the grave.

When it had been some hours since the last servant had appeared to eavesdrop, Yeva cleared her raw throat and stood in order to put another log on the fire, which was burning low in its grate. Radak had fallen asleep on the love seat beside his wife, head thrown back, breathing audibly through his mouth in deference to his hay fever. Lena threw him a fond look from where she sat curled in the now-limp circle of his arm, and nudged him gently until he settled to the side and his snoring ceased.

“He works too hard,” she murmured into the quiet, the first anyone had spoken in some time.

Yeva sank down onto the rug before the fire, turning so that the coals warmed her back, and hugged her knees to her chest. “I knew he loved you for more than Father’s wealth.”

Lena’s smile widened, and she sneaked another glance at the man sleeping next to her. “I had hoped. But that time was so awful, so full of unhappiness, it seemed all our luck had fled and everything that could go sour would.”

“Our father died,” Asenka said softly. “And with him, our little sister.”

Yeva had always been closer to Asenka than Lena, in spirit as well as age. And it had always been Asenka to whom Yeva had confessed her heart. From the time Yeva could talk, Asenka had always been the one to listen to her when her little soul could no longer bear the weight of everything she wanted, the adventure and magic and the wide, wide wood, and all the things she could not name, that no one else seemed to understand.

Yeva’s eyes stung, but she’d shed so many tears that day that none fell now, the well inside her dry. “If I could have sent word I was alive, I would have. I didn’t think I would ever see any of you again.”

“We waited as long as we could,” Lena said, smile fading now. “But after summer ended, we knew we could not spend another winter in the cabin, not when Radak had this place for us again. And not with your new nephew on the way.”

Yeva knew Lena was hoping for a boy, but she could hear a sound beneath everything else, a tiny, pulsing rhythm like the one she’d heard in the Beast’s valley, and when she closed her eyes her sister’s afterimage seemed to glow against her eyelids. And in that glow Yeva could see that the child would be a girl, though she could not have explained how she saw it. It was magic, and it frightened Yeva that she could see it even here, in town, as removed from the Beast’s valley as it was from the far eastern sea.

Yeva watched her sister, and her unborn niece, and said nothing.

The quiet broke as Radak’s breath caught and he harrumphed in his sleep, half waking. Lena took his hand and kissed his cheek and sent him off to bed and he went, only after she promised she would come soon.